CONTINENTAL THRIFT
How Fiona Kolbinger, the first female winner in 2019 of the unsupported, Europe-spanning Transcontinental Race, came from nowhere to win the prestigious event
At the start of last summer, Fiona Kolbinger was an unknown. Then, out of the blue, the 24-year-old German medical student won the gruelling Transcontinental Race (TCR), beating the secondplace rider by 10 hours – and winning the hearts of dot watchers – those who follow the moving GPS location of riders online - with her grit and versatility.
Kolbinger came to Look Mum, No Hands in Old Street on a warm September afternoon with fellow rider Bjorn Lenhart, for the official TCR race debrief. Her achievements made global headlines, alongside images of a tough, self-reliant competitor, smiling on the bike, or pumping her tyres at the roadside in a blue travel-stained jersey, with inner tubes across her body like Tour de France riders of old.
In real life, Kolbinger has the air of someone who is surprised, and a little uncomfortable, at all the attention. When I ask, Kolbinger rattles off the numbers. “It was 10 days, two hours, 48 minutes,” she says. And the distance: “4124 kilometres. I know exactly. I've been asked a couple of times.”
Of course, it’s the story behind those numbers that’s most interesting. How did this unknown 24-year-old medical student end up beating a field of tough competitors in a notoriously gruelling unsupported, non-stop cycling race across Europe? “I didn’t expect it at all,” she explains. “I knew that I was strong, but I would have never expected to finish first in this event. I really had no idea how strong the others were, before the race.” Kolbinger got into cycling just five years ago after buying her first road bike: a tourer with racks, which she cycled from Heidelberg, where she was studying medicine, to Stockholm, covering “120 to 170km per day for 12 days”.
She was instantly hooked. “It was the most fun holiday. I slept in youth hostels, I had huge bags on my pannier rack.”
The following year, without any training other than “running a bit”, with a similar setup she rode Land’s End to John O’Groats in eight days.
Because Kolbinger swam competitively as a child, and ran “a couple of marathons”, a friend suggested she join her triathlon club – at which point she splashed out 250 euros on a 12kg, broken racing bike.
After she rode the 350km from Heidelberg to Zurich in a day on that broken bike, friends persuaded her to do the 2017 London-EdinburghLondon. It was a steep learning curve. When people at the start of LEL asked her how she prepared, she said: “Well, the longest distance I cycled this year was a 200-kilometre ride - just one. I really didn’t have a lot of miles in my legs, about 2000 kilometres or so, and I felt really badly prepared”.
It was there she heard about the TCR, and Bjorn, a fellow rider told her, “You are such a strong cyclist… maybe it’s something for you.”
When she got home from London, TCR number five was in its final days. “I was amazed from the first moment.”
Kolbinger almost applied in 2018, but “had very few vacation days, and it was just a bit of a stressful year”.
That was, in fact, her final year of medical school. In 2019 she pushed the button.
“I wanted to have this adventure,” she says. “The TCR brings you to places that the usual middle European person wouldn’t visit on their own. By choosing the controls [the checkpoints of the race each rider must ride through] in a certain order, the TCR forces you to see all the beauty of the entire continent. The route makes it harder, but they also make it a lot more beautiful.”
Training buddy Lenhart describes Kolbinger as a complete rider that’s strong, can plan and fix a bike. Is that the secret to success?
“I do think so,” she says. “I think the mental ability of pushing through pain, or pushing through sleep deprivation is a big part of success on the TCR.”
“It's sometimes just being intuitively quick and wise with your decisions. It’s a constant pondering.”
Did the intensive nature of medical training, the sleepless nights, prepare her in any way for the rigours of cycling 4124km unsupported in little more than 10 days? Her answer is a little chicken and egg: maybe she chose medicine because she can push through hard nights, and perhaps those are the same requirements of a successful TCR rider.
“You always need to think what is next on the to do list. I actually can’t remember any time that I was not organised regarding my future plans.
“There might also be other approaches for the TCR that brings success, but this is really what I feel made my race a lot easier and a lot more organised”.
Kolbinger’s race days on the TCR ran thus: three or four hours’ sleep, a breakfast she’d bought the day before, “and then I would cycle, cycle and cycle a bit more. If you are lucky, there are very few problems happening on most days. So then depending on the day, I would just cycle all day and try to not stop a lot.
“And at night at some point, my eyes would get tired, and then I would just go to sleep. I didn’t really plan where I would sleep… I knew that I should push as long as I could.”
One night she slept in a doorway in France, woken by a concerned woman who looked about to call the emergency services. She first tried to converse in “bad French”.
“In the end, I showed her the track leaders map and told her that I’m dot 66 and I’m leading the race. She was really excited about the whole thing. She actually brought me some bread rolls. It was really nice food but I had to refuse it. I had to explain in my poor French that I can’t take it - because riders cannot accept help from anybody.”
She describes the experience as “type 1 fun, because I loved it while I was doing it. I was really happy about the entire race and how well it went”.
Would she recommend others taking on the challenge? “Yes,” she says, whether male or female.
“I know some women feel intimidated by male domination in cycling,” she says, and includes herself in that at times. However, she believes women are suited to ultraendurance sport, which relies on so much more than testosterone.
Will Kolbinger do it again? Yes, she would, but things have changed. She’s now working in abdominal surgery at a centre for cancer surgery in Dresden.
“I do think I will have some time for training, too,” she says, adding that Dresden “is a really beautiful place for riding a bike”, with mountains, flats, “and a huge long-distance community”.
“I think training will be really fun next year,” she says, adding: “it will be very different for me, because now I’m not an unknown face in the community anymore.”
She considers her 2019 race “lucky” in weather and a lack of mechanicals and “wouldn't ever go into the TCR saying, I need to win it; this is completely irrational.
“In the end it was a huge adventure”, she continues. “The fact that I won is actually something that, for me, occurred next to it.”
The Transcontinental Race returns for its 8th edition in 2020, beginning in the French city of Brest on 25 July and finishing in Burgas, Bulgaria. To register visit transcontinental.cc